Autumn rains bring out the best of the Rio Grande Valley

A Mecca of the butterfly world

The Rio Grande Valley is a paradise of butterflies. In every garden, in every field, and even in the grass along the roadsides, butterflies swarm like bees. But rather than sting like bees, they simply show off an array of beautiful colors.

Autumn rains in the mild, semitropical climate of the Valley have fostered the current spectacular show of butterflies. The moisture, which has broken a long dry spell, has stimulated the emergence of butterflies from their chrysalises and generated a profusion of wildflowers.

My wife, Kathy, and I saw the butterflies last week. I was in the Valley to give a program for the annual Wild in Willacy event at Raymondville, and Kathy was leading a photography weekend in McAllen for the North American Nature Photography Association (NANPA).

Everyone we talked to was astounded at the magnitude of butterflies.

Kathy and I took a little time on Saturday to survey the butterflies at the Rio Grande Valley Bentsen State Park. The park will be the headquarters of the World Birding Center, due to open next fall. But its butterflies are equal to the birds.

The park has a beautiful butterfly garden with plants such as mistflower, Turk's cap and sunflowers. These host butterfly larvae and provide nectar for adult butterflies.

When we arrived, there was intermittent rain from the remnants of Hurricane Kenna; nonetheless, a multitude of butterflies hovered over the flower garden. Especially striking were the orange queens and soldiers, butterflies similar in appearance to monarchs. Their splashy tangerine color accentuated the lavender blooms of mistflowers.

The soldier is a Valley butterfly specialty we don't see in Houston. One of its identifying marks is a dark smudge on the ventral middle surface of the hind wing. Kathy remarked that the smudge seemed to have resulted from the rain causing a run in the black markings on the orange wings.

We headed to Lucy's Garden in Mission, a demonstration garden that typifies the flowering plants of the Valley. More queens and soldiers, plus butterflies such as large orange sulphurs, laviana white-skippers and elada checkerspots -- butterflies special to the Valley.

On Sunday, we took NANPA photographers on a journey to shoot pictures of butterflies. We started at one of our favorite spots, the Valley Nature Center in Weslaco.

The rains had let up, the temperature was a pleasant 69 degrees, and the butterflies were too numerous to count. The first butterfly treat was a red-bordered pixie (Melanis pixe), which ranges up from Costa Rica only as far north as the Rio Grande Valley. It's an inch and a half long, with coal-black wings tipped in orange and crimson-red "eye" spots on the dorsal central surface. It looks like a Halloween decoration.

Two days earlier at the center, Kathy had discovered a rare ornythion swallowtail (Papillo ornythion), a butterfly that resembles the giant swallowtail in Houston. Another rarity she found was a gold-spotted aguna (Aguna asander). Both species were the first ever seen at the Valley Nature Center.

The NANPA photographers spread out on the grounds of the center like paleontologists digging with picks for fossils. Their macro lenses were ready to capture close-up images of resplendent butterflies hovering over brightly colored flowers.

The butterflies had names as exotic as their appearance, names like zebra heliconian, Julia and white peacock. Lize Cavazos, a Valley naturalist and expert on the area's butterflies, helped call out their names.

"The Rio Grande Valley is a Mecca of the butterfly world," Cavazos said, "and the Valley Nature Center in Weslaco is right smack dab in the middle of the whole thing. The Valley gets an influx of North American and tropical butterflies when the environment is just right; and because of the rain, the environment is perfect."

We saw more of the cornucopia of Valley butterflies at the expansive butterfly garden in the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge.

I walked down one of the refuge's nature trails in the late afternoon and found a rare and exquisitely beautiful Mexican bluewing (Myscelia ethusa). The dorsal surface of its wings was a deep royal blue streaked horizontally in aqua blue, but the undersurface of its closed wings was the color of a dead leaf. It was stunning.

All the Valley's butterflies are stunning. An autumn trip to see them is worthwhile even if your interest in butterflies is only casual and you don't know a Southern dogface from a cloudless sulphur. But if you carry a camera, I'll wager you'll quickly become enthusiastic about butterflies.

David Plunkett, a photographer from Lake Jackson, and his wife, Jane, wound up buying butterfly identification charts.

"We had not been involved in butterfly-watching before," Plunkett said. "But I can see us expanding our horizons now that we've seen the tremendous variety of butterflies in the Valley and started taking butterfly pictures."

Birds and butterflies open people's eyes to a whole new world of nature and to a gorgeous region of Texas like the Rio Grande Valley.

"I had never been to the Rio Grande Valley before," said Houston photographer Gary Brockway. "Now that I'm here and see how great it is, I'm kicking myself for not having been down here years before. I'm incredibly excited about coming back. I had no idea how rich the area was with nature or how accessible it was to people."

Alyssa Mueller, a photographer from Clear Lake, said, "I had not been to the Valley before, and I like the fact that there are so many wildlife preserves, parks and other natural areas."

You can find information about butterflies and other nature activities in the Valley at www.valleynaturecenter.org Or you may call 956-969-2475.